Storing energy in the form of compressed gas has a long history and components tend to be well tested, reliable, and have long lifetimes. The general principles for compressed gas energy storage are generated energy (e.g., electric energy, etc.) is used to compress gas and thus converts the original energy to pressure potential energy; the energy is later recovered in a useful form (e.g. converted back to electric energy, etc.) via appropriate gas expansion. Advantages to compressed gas energy storage include low specific energy costs, long-lifetime, low maintenance, reasonable energy density, and good reliability. However, recovering the energy from the stored compressed gas has certain drawbacks. For example, systems that utilize pneumatic to hydraulic conversion to drive a hydraulic motor are subject to a decaying pressure profile, which in turn produces decreasing and/or irregular power output.
Conventional usage of a fixed displacement (FD) hydraulic motor is to convert fluid power into rotational mechanical power. This is used, for example, in a hydraulically powered crane where a fluid power source is used to drive a FD hydraulic motor whose rotating shaft drives a winch that raises or lowers a load. Increasing or decreasing the pressure to the FD hydraulic motor increases or decreases the torque to the winch, allowing the load to be raised or lowered. In the afore-mentioned pneumatic to hydraulic conversion systems, especially those with accumulator discharge, the input to the hydraulic motor has a decaying pressure profile. For such a decaying pressure profile and for a FD hydraulic motor, in which torque is proportional to pressure, torque decreases proportionally. Likewise, hydraulic flow rate and motor RPM are typically proportional to pressure. With decaying pressure and torque and with the FD motor driving a constant load, RPM and flow rate also decay, which decreases power (torque times RPM) in a quadratic fashion.
In addition, in a system in which a single fluid power source (usually at constant pressure) is used to power multiple FD hydraulic motors to drive multiple loads (e.g., to drive multiple winches with different loads), throttling valves are necessary to decrease the source pressure to a controlled pressure and provide torque control of each FD hydraulic motor, allowing each load to be independently controlled. The disadvantage with this approach is that a significant amount of energy is lost and converted to heat in the throttling valves, greatly reducing system efficiency.
Variable displacement (VD) hydraulic motors were developed to provide torque control from a constant or nearly constant pressure fluid power source without the need for throttling valves. By eliminating the energy losses associated with throttling control valves, system efficiencies are greatly increased. To do this, the control system for the VD hydraulic motor increases or decreases the displacement of the motor to increase or decrease the torque output to account for changes in load.
The prior art does not disclose systems and methods for providing constant electrical power with a staged hydraulic-pneumatic energy conversion system having hydraulic outputs having widely-varying pressures.